Scandalous sculptures by Maurizio Cattelan, for which they lay out millions

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Maurizio Cattelan(Maurizio Cattelan) is a world-renowned self-taught artist and a living example of how a "bad" provincial guy became an icon of world contemporary art. Not recognized for many years, he still managed to achieve fame and widespread popularity. And today he is one of the most expensive contemporary artists in the world. The artist has managed to widen the scope of public opinion on what art really is.

Italian Maurizio Cattelan was born in Padua to a poor family of a cleaning lady and a truck driver in 1960. From an early age, he showed a desire to make a lot of money, no matter what and how. He was a postal worker, a cook, a janitor, and a sperm bank donor; he also worked in a morgue. He considers idiocy to be his exclusive feature of behavior.

He did not study "making art" anywhere. However, his positioning himself as an artist, an incredible number of times everywhere and everywhere, did the trick. And Maurizio from the end of the 80s began to exhibit his work at various exhibitions. At first, these were some funny things of an applied nature, and later provocative works that shocked the audience, bewilderment, indignation, and aggression. After visiting the exposition of his works, no one left indifferent.

Cattelan started working as a sculptor in 1999. His trademark is his full-length wax figures. And rarely does any installation created by an artist go unnoticed, as a rule, it always provokes a scandal., - says about his work Maurizio Cattelan.

The provocative work of a postmodern artist is sophisticated and rich in symbolic meaning. And the unrestrained energy and imagination of the maestro is sometimes simply shocking. So, for example, Cattelan is very fond of children and animals, but in his work this is expressed quite harshly. An example of this is the composition "The Hanged Children".

During the demonstration of this creation in one of the parks in Milan, this "work of art" was followed by an immediate reaction - one man, unable to bear it, climbed a tree and cut off two "hanged children". The man fell along with the sculptures. The police who came to the call cut off the third sculpture. After this incident, the inhabitants of the city under the tree, where the sculptural composition was exhibited, arranged a debate on the topic "Permissible and unacceptable in art and life." This was the artist's goal - to evoke a reaction from people to this kind of cruelty., - said the artist himself about his creation.

The artist also often uses animals and birds in his work as provocative images. For example, the story about a squirrel that committed suicide. In this case, it is of particular importance that this character is not made of plastic or wax, but is a real stuffed animal. By this, the master wanted to show that animals also feel and suffer. And he also showed the duality of human nature, which both fights for nature and at the same time opposes it.

Cattelan approaches any topic in a non-standard way, with only his own vision of the problem. For example, here's another symbolic sculpture - a cat's skeleton. Here the author wanted to say that in the near future such a scenario is possible when the remains of an ordinary cat can become a museum exhibit in the likeness of a dinosaur skeleton.

In 2010, in Milan, in Piazza Affari, in front of the stock exchange, the artist erected a monument called L. O. V. E. The height of this "masterpiece" with a pedestal is 11 meters. The very same 4-meter palm is made of Carrara marble. It is implied that this palm, with its fingers cut off, is raised in a fascist salute. This offensive gesture is directed as a challenge to all ideologies.

The creations of this unpredictable postmodernist often found themselves at the center of grandiose scandals. So, the famous sculptural composition "The Ninth Hour" (1999), depicting the figure of the Pope, struck by a meteorite, in 2006 was sold at auction for three million dollars. Although at one time she caused a flurry of public outrage.

The sculpture "Praying Hitler" was exhibited by the master for the first time in Germany, thereby showing the Germans their greatest shame. It was shock therapy, the goal of which was to get rid of the complex of historical guilt. The artist portrayed Adolf as pitiful and funny, kneeling, either praying or asking for forgiveness. The sculpture is, as it were, the embodiment of evil and atonement at the same time.

In 2004, in addition to the Pope and Adolf Hitler, Maurizio puts the barefoot John F. Kennedy in the coffin, which erased the line between the incompatibility of politics and art.

Says Cattelan. - His credo is social acuteness, a critical attitude to the external environment and works with feelings such as disgust, dislike, fear of death or a secret desire for it.

In 2012, the most ambitious in its scope exhibition of Cattelan's works took place in the Solomon Guggenheim Museum in New York called "Everything". One hundred twenty-eight works displayed in the exhibition were collected and hung at different levels in the gallery atrium. The exposition was a composition in space, the most complex in scale over the entire history of the museum.

In Russia, the work of the scandalous master has practically not been seen. An exception is chess, which is called "Good versus Evil" (2003). Here the sculptor, on the one hand, exposed villains - Hitler - as king, Stalin, Rasputin, Al Capone, Donatella Versace - as queen, and on the other - Martin Luther King, Dalai Lama, Saint Francis, Mother Teresa, Lenin, Buratino …

Maurizio Cattelan, with his enviable ambition, which raises many people from the provinces to the top of the Olympus of public recognition, could, with a high degree of probability, succeed in a completely different field of activity not related to art.

The artist now lives and works in New York and Milan.

Most recently, the work of an American artist Michel Basquiat was sold for 110.5 million dollars and took first place among the works of American artists in the art market.